Make it a double feature with I Shot Andy Warhol and save!

Kimberly Peirce’s wrenching re-creation of the events leading up to a widely publicized hate crime—the rape and murder of a Nebraska trans man by two ex-convicts who had discovered his birth-assigned sex—was one of Killer Films’ major critical and popular successes. One of the main plot threads in Boys Don’t Cry is a compassionate romance between Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank) and a young woman (Chloë Sevigny) associated with his eventual murderers, and the film’s sensitive balance of tenderness and cruelty surely helped give it much of its unprecedented crossover appeal. The heart and soul of the movie, however, is Swank’s towering, fearless performance, which earned her the first of her two Academy Awards.